You canNOT be serious!

The spectacle continues. Maduro announced that Hugo Chávez would be embalmed, only to backtrack a few days later. He announced a constitutional amendment to allow Chávez to be buried in the National Pantheon, and then inexplicably shelved it. He has said that Chávez influenced the election of the new Pope. Maduro’s partner, Cilia Flores, recently said that Chávez had “won the battle for his health” because he has now multiplied and become immortalized. Further elevating Chavez’s figure to that of Christ, Maduro recently said that he did everything “for him [Chávez], with him, and in him,” and that attacks against himself and his aides were akin to an attack on Chávez, because they were all his “apostles.”

1 COMMENT

You cannot call this guy a politician. Here in Holanda we also have that sort of clowns who think they have the knowledge to lead a country. Don’t say i can, but this is pure theatre and don’t do any right to the Venezuelan people and there country.

The revolution got its ass kicked in 2010, 2007 and won at a very small margin in 2012 compared to other incumbent governments despite a huge amount of oil income (the real reason it’s still in power).

So, this pathetic excuse for a mayor called Jorge Rodriguez has time for a weekly press conference to trash talk Capriles. I guess in Libertador all problems are solved… NOT!

There are 69 homicides per 100.000 inhabitants each year in Libertador, roja-rojita since 1999, but he prefers to waste his time talking about some obscure anecdote of the WWII or blame Capriles for our FUBAR justice system. And I’m not making that number up. He just admitted to that during a press conference last week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDENW7-luKI (from min 2:00)

Had this guy any moral, he’d do as Capriles and Falcon did: take a break from the government position to run the campaign. Sadly, everybody knows that Jorge Rodriguez has not a single ounce of decency in his body. Nothing better can be expected of the “impartial” CNE member that made up the “firmas planas” and latter got the VP as a reward.

I would love to see if one the pollsters has a question on people’s opinion on the Maduro campaign. There has to be a significant number of people who will still vote for him, but actually hate the campaign.

I bet there are a lot of Simon Bolivars in the registro civil, but they needed a gringo one, and there it is, gracias Wikipedia por los favores recibidos… Maduro is more the comedian than a politician, and in that he also fails miserably. After sending that cheque to heaven, and recently saying that Chavez sent him a tweet from the ultratumba, I fear for what awaits if (a very hopeful if, I know) he becomes president. “Last King of Scotland” kind of crazy, anyone?

On another note, there is a rumour running on Facebook that cantv and corpoelec was sold to the chinese, does anyone have any info? Nothing surprises me now, but…

Maduro is a politician , what he says or does is meant to make him pleasing to an audience , it says more about what Maduro thinks of his audience than about Maduro himself ( although maybe he subliminally deceives himself into believing the crazy things he says to rouse himself up and sound more convincing) , but it is his image of the latter that dictates what he says . In Maduros mind his audience consist of a mass of very superstitious, primitive , emotionally hungry people, who will believe anything to rouse their fanatically inspired passions to fever pitch . He sounds kitschy, deranged and absurd to normal people who have some sense of reality , who retain some basic component of common sense . Even if we were chavistas we would feel revulsed at the crazyness of his statements , but to him being a chavista means that you will believe anything however fantastical if it arouses your sectarian emotions. If that helps him win the forthcoming election , it says something very worrysome about the state of mind of the mayority of people in this country !! It means that the gulf between ordinary chavista rank and filel is very deep , as deep as the division that separates the mad from the sane.

Suniaga is completely right! The ridiculous and absurd becomes normal. This weekend i saw the chilean movie NO, which I think every venezuelan should see no matter what he believes in. I was again struck by many things, specially by the facho tenor of our supposedly commie regime, this crazy ideologicall compost of beliefs.
And by the absolute debasement of our society they have cultivated with agresiveness. I don’t want to post the animalplanetlike disgusting video of el desnalgue in “los juanes” yesterday. But beyond the moralistic or simplistic view of what happened, all I can say is that when the fabric that holds together a society is ripped, trampled, spat on and the unthinkable becomes the norm, that society is going down the drain, and fast.
Every Sodoma has it’s Gomorrah.

The implication is that PDVSA is not already productive. To a supposed fence sitter (read: Rabid Chavista who likes to pretend he is an independent thinker) like OW that is an unthinkable insult towards his favorite politicos.

Ramirez and his family have become obscenely rich during the Chavez administration through blatant acts of corruption. Look up his brother in law or cousin or mother in law. Recently he was involved in a money laundering scandal in the US involving millions of dollars, I don’t know if he and his entourage are the richest persons in Venezuela right now, but they might be in the top 10 and probably have more money and certainly more power than Capriles who is constantly accused by this very same people of being an oligarch.
Do you really believe that none of the boliburgueses aided by the chavista government are among the richest persons in Venezuela right now?

I’m sure Ramirez is much wealthier than 98% of Venezuelans at least. He has a six figure salary.
But if you want to assert that he is now wealthier than Cisneros and others by virtue of stealing so much money from PDVSA, as Capriles clearly implies, then you ought to come up with proof. Got any?
For example, money laundering is illegal in the U.S. So are there even arrest warrants or indictments pending against Ramirez in the United States?
Lacking evidence this is all kind of politically motivated, unsubstantiated bullshit along the same lines as Maduro’s accusation of Chavez’s cancer being induced. As usual, bullshit versus bullshit and no discussion of issues.

OW, you must be hardwired… The statement in that context can easily imply severalt things, including as one might use the analogous expression about Obama being the most powerful man in the world; it’s only while he holds office. So Ramírez is the richest man in Venezuela, really, as long as chavismo not only lets him hold office, but also lets him wield PDVSA’s monetary power at will.

No way. Ramirez not only doesn’t own PDVSA and its money isn’t his money but he doesn’t determine how it is spent – the Assembly and the President do. And in that case you would go around saying Maduro is now the richest person in Venezuela, save that that is an absurdity as well.

OW, as always trying to use rationality to blind people from seeing the truth.

Ramírez may not officially own, nor control the money, but no matter how you try to twist the facts, he wields its power. Again, the statement of richness was within the context that he is the only one (again, not literal) in PDVSA that will be fired if Capriles wins, and the reason is the way Ramírez suggests, permits and promotes PDVSA’s money to be managed.

I refer you back to the Obama analogy, he doesn’t own the bombs, nor decides to start a war, nor decides to direct each missile, but he is still validly considered the most powerful man on Earth due to his influence over each of those actions, like Ramírez’s influence over each of PDVSA’s spenditures.

In the sense of “the man who can write a check with the most zeroes in it without it bouncing”, this is a plain statement of fact. The money may not be “his”, but then he sure acts as though it is, and nobody checks, so…

He missed a few miracles: Like Harina PAN (Mana) falling everyday in the Barrios. Multiplying the cans of atune at the Mercal. Or my favorite, turning water into Polar!
I doubt we we see the Lazerus one!

Naturally there are no statistics on the regimes tolerance and fostering of corrupt practices among its leaders and their relatives and friends . But evidence of the corruption every so often makes a splash like the when it was discovered that Pdvsa oil workers pension fund had been plundered or more recently when it became known that a US Bank was involved in a lawsuit with a former employee who denounced to US Authorities how a venezuelan lawyer was making 3 million US$ deposits in an account from money recieved as ‘legal fees’ from Minister Ramirez and later transferring the same to numbered swiss bank accounts. US litigation is sometimes the only way of knowing officially about some acts of corruption. Often enough however you see signs of it in verifiable pictures and information posted in facebook which show the mansions and property and life style of high regime officials in the US for example. Then there is the grapevine information flowing directly from people connected to the families or entourage of high officials or their ‘partners in crime’ , or the evidence from seeing how people connected to the regime by family or personal ties spend huge amounts of money in buying mansions and rebuilding them or on fancy trips or luxuries or on offshore investments which cannot be accounted for as the fruits of honest business success . The evidence is overwhelming that the revolution is making a lot of people very rich and that there is no real effort to stem that corruption or to fight it. The revolution is turning out to be more corrupt than the 4th republic it so loudly condems ever was. and yet the discourse is shameless in its denunciation of the corruption of people whose wealth or property was born of years of honest work and effort by themselves or their parents. the so called burgueses or oligarchs . There should be no shame in having personal or family wealth which was honestly obtained , and yet the regime doesnt cease to label it as corrupt and criminal .